Jim Goad on Quentin Tarantino, x eleventy

A couple years later I met comedienne Margaret Cho, who had dated Tarantino back in the early 90s when I was producing a violent magazine that had gained some notoriety due to the fact that my first wife and I posed with guns and cultivated an image as a Starkweather and Fugate duo ready to go postal at any moment. Cho told me she’d given Tarantino an anthology of my magazine and that he’d used me and my first wife as the character templates for his screenplay to the film Natural Born Killers,which was another ultra-violent film that seemed to have zero visceral understanding of violence.

Whereas I struggled to understand violence because I’d been exposed to it since infancy and because my deaf brother had been brutally murdered, Tarantino seemed to fetishize violence because he’d watched a lot of violent movies and thought it was awesome.